My company's web-managed app only has Firefox 3 as the latest approved Firefox. Our software gives nasty warnings if you're running too new a version. We only add new versions about once every six months to one year. And, of course, it requires testing. So we'll probably have FF6 (MAYBE 7) supported in our next release.

It doesn't just inconvenience US, it annoys our customers. The fact that Firefox said "we don't care about the corporate user" doesn't matter.

Hell, *I* like to use Firefox, but my own test environment bitches at me every time I try to. (Of course, we don't support Chrome at all.)Reply

You're fortunately wrong. All the add-ons hosted by Mozilla is being automatically checked for compatibility and the vast majority is validated as compatible. The developers of the add-ons that are incompatible are of course getting notified.

Mostly it is only externally hosted plugins that gets disabled and that is a good thing! And yes, you can easily enable the add-ons again.Reply

I guess that depends on how you look at it. I personally think that making the browser use 20% less memory is a big deal (included in release 7).

I also think that automatically disabling externally hosted add-ons (which various companies has sneakily installed) is a pretty nice thing. Remember the Skype add-on that was responsible for many thousands of crashes?Reply

Progress is progress, true. But the numbering scheme breaks add-ons and destroys compatibility, because add-ons and websites are looking for explicit version numbers. You can't write an addon that's compatible with versions 4+, because you don't know what's coming in version 5.

There are tons of addons that worked perfectly fine in 4.x but are now broken because:

A) The developers have things to do other than writing software they don't get paid for

B) Mozilla keeps jacking up the version numbers every month-and-a-half for piddly shit that deserve a 0.0.1 bump at most.Reply

Wonder if they will still release security/bug fixes for the last "major" version number. Will be an interesting fiasco in the making if they didn't, since most people probably won't update major version every few weeks.Reply

"Firefox retains its clean split between people on the new, rapid release versions (4-9) and those on the old stable version (3.6). The rapid release users are upgrading fairly quickly, though the cut-overs are neither as rapid nor as automated as those of Chrome. However, almost a quarter of Firefox users are sticking with version 3.6. Until and unless Mozilla produces a stable edition with long-term support, this is unlikely to change."Reply

This is a major issue. Most of my corporate and business clients cannot update past 4.0.1 because of this critical add-ons for their business that do not working on 7.x or 8.x.

There was nothing wrong with the previous versioning scheme - when a new "major" version of Firefox was out, you knew that there were going to be some changes to the UI and a bunch of under-the-hood fixes/tweaks. Now it's just minor revisions respun with silly numbers that break add-ons.Reply

There was an update schedule by Mozilla in which they are releasing 9 before year's end and it should sport 64-bit. I could've been mistaken and it might be in 10 but they stated it was to be released quickly after 8.Reply

Apparently people feel Google is "doing more" because they have more frequent releases. I personally like the new release schedule Mozilla has set but I do agree that the changes presented in v8 do not warrant a full release. I'm betting we will appreciate what Mozilla has done in this version with the overall experience (under the hood improvements). If not i'll just trick myself and check HTML5test and hope there is a bigger overall score. Bigger number means better browser right? :/Reply

I've been using BarTab Lite to disable the loading of a tab until I click it, and as a power user (that at any given time has tens of tabs open), it is a life saver. It is definitely awesome that they now include that functionality built in as well as the disable add ons by default. I hate it when those programs (sometime sneakily) install add ons on your browser (I usually remove them, but still), and it is good that they will be hidden away by default.

In regards to the discussion about the version numbers, I couldn't care less, but no one can argue the fact that we are now getting little incremental updates in a speedy manner, way better than waiting months for new functionality IMO.I'm not 100% sure (could be an illusion, don't think so though) but I think we also end up getting more over the same period of time. Every release since 4 had features that I found useful.

it's pretty frustrating. Model numbers should be indicative of the changes that have been made. Firefox 4 to firefox 8 nothing is that different. we really are on like 4.3.5. Not a big deal for random users. But any group, corperation, club, school, whatever, it's a fucking problem.Reply

I upgraded to mozilla firefox 8.0 x86 en-us and every time i try to open it is says" your computer must be restarted to complete a previous upgrade of Firefox. Do you wish to reboot now"? i have rebooted several times and still no good.. i cannot even uninstalll